Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality

After reading Clay Shirky's article Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality I have gained a new view on the blogosphere. In the article he discusses the power law distribution and how it relates to blogging in that a small percentage of blogs receive the majority of the views. This being said, I don't see that there is anything negative about this fact. Prior to this year I was not a big blogger and it was not until I was introduced to blogging in my class Ideological Media that I became immersed in the blogosphere. Now I find myself going to different blogs everyday to get my news. With my experience in blogging as an example, I would say that my blogging does follow the power law distribution model that Shirky discusses. I do find myself viewing the same blogs everyday and the blogs I do view are those that are the most popular. I was referred to these blogs by fellow classmates and professors and feel that they have been invaluable in me being more informed about what is going on in the world.

I feel that Shirky sees the power law model of blogging as a negative aspect of the industry. Personally though I see nothing wrong with it. I feel that the blogs I view provide me with the best information in the most efficient way. I have looked at other blogs to get my news and did not find them as appealing or as informative. Hence, there is nothing wrong with a small majority of the blogs getting a majority of the views. They are undoubtedly the best blogs and in a capitalist society they will continue to get the most views until a better blog has been developed.

Obviously I have made some contentious points in this blog post and I would love to hear feed-back from you all as to how you felt about this article also.

Reflections on Lanier

Towards the end of Lanier's book You Are Not A Gadget we begin to see the authors reflections on the role of computers in our lives. In this section I feel he makes one of his most important points in that humans need to play a more important role than computers. We cannot let computers take over and rule our lives like we have thus far. We have let ourselves become stupid and allow our computers to run our lives. Things that were once basic tasks we now rely on computers to get accomplished. As Lanier preaches, we cannot precipitate this trend and instead need to defy it. While computers will always play a major role in our lives going forward we can't allow computers to completely take over our lives. As I discussed in an earlier blog post, computers have already started to take a dominant role in our economy, replacing millions of jobs. While this has certain benefits for sure, we are still uncertain of the long term effects, long term effects that in my perception are not going to be quite as good as the current benefits.

While I am not preaching that computers are terrible and that we can't rely on them to do certain tasks, I am saying that we cannot continue to rely more and more on our computers. We continue to create applications for them that dumb tasks down to make them easier. What we are in turn creating however is a society that without their computers is lost because they can't get anything done. We cannot let this happen and while I don't have the solution to this problem myself, this is something that we need to continue to work towards finding a solution for.

Question from Class on 2/3/11

Going along with my last blog post, I saw an intrinsic tie between technology and the job market. As a senior right now who is trying to be employed in three months when I graduate this is obviously a hot topic on my mind. That being the case I structured my question around these points.

Given the current state of the economy today what effect do you think the developments of technology have had on the job market? We have seen computers replace millions jobs that one employed a large majority of our population and unemployment numbers continue to rise. Is there any way to reverse this trend or will this continue as computers evolve even further?

The Technological Age

As computers become more and more advanced, they seem to have taken over a role in society that was unthinkable only a few years ago. This is especially true in regards to the job sector where we have seen thousands of jobs disappear because companies realized that they could replace their workers with computer operated machinery. Lanier alludes to this point when he discusses how one of the dark sides to industrialization is that computers are making the skills that humans worked so hard to master completely obsolete. No longer does GM need to employ as many employees at their factories to produce cars. Rather the majority of the construction is done primarily by a robot who is able to build the car cheaper and faster than a human.

The key question to ask of all of this is what are the long term effects of computer operated machines becoming more and more of a fixture in the workplace and replacing the individuals who used to work those jobs? The answer to this question is not simple for one has to examine both the economic benefits and pitfalls of this development. In my opinion I feel that we can not place all our eggs in one basket and rely on computers to accomplish jobs that we do have trained workers to do. While computers are able to save these companies money, they are also hurting our economy by making jobs obsolete.

All this being said what we need to take out of this all is the fact that computers have assumed an important place in our economy. We can't change what we have already done now. What we need to do going forward though is analyze the pros and cons of using computers to replace workers. We cannot let our skilled employees disappear because they have been replaced by computers. We need to be able to both embrace this new technological age but also be weary of its implications.

Jaron Lanier

After reading Part 1 of Jaron Lanier's You are Not a Gadget and discussing it in class today, I gained a totally new understanding of the modern Internet. Aside from all the good that it appears to do, we were faced by some of the grim realities of the destructiveness of the Internet. While the Internet does allow people to be their own individual selves by creating profiles and creating a persona, this is often used with negative intentions. The online culture that has been created has allowed people to criticize one another through a completely impersonal channel. With this being the case, while the Internet is allowing people to be more connected, it is also leading to a complete disconnect among people. The ability to be an anonymous individual with the means to say anything about any material that may be posted on the Internet has allowed people to create new persona's that may destroy others. In certain cases that Lanier cites, these critiques have led to personal attacks as well as suicides. These undoubtedly are not things that we commonly think of when we think of the Internet. We think of all the good it has done and how great a job has done in bringing us together. We never think about the negative aspects of the Internet. However as Lanier exposes in the first section of his book, we need to be able to face the harsh reality that the Internet can also be an extremely destructive force.

What Is The Fair Way To Be Graded In This Class?

Obviously we are all confronted with the brash reality that the grading of this class with inevitably allow for a few members of this class to receive an F for 40% of our grade. As we discussed on the first day of class, the reason that this was the initial means of grading for the class was to encourage competition amongst our peers. Nonetheless I feel that while this may increase the competition amongst us, there are other ways by which we can compete with our classmates without several of them having to receive a failing grade.

After the first day of class, we lost over 25% of our classmates because they weren't willing to put the work in along with the fact that they undoubtedly were scared about the fact that they could fail this class. This was immediately a red flag that displayed that this grading system may be a bit aggressive. While college is about learning materials that can help us when we graduate, classes should be constructed in such a way that if the student puts the work in required of the class they should receive a passing grade. Classes should not be set up to fail students, no matter how much percent of the grade that portion may account for.

The grimness of this situation became extremely clear to the class after our presentations last Tuesday. Given the set up of the class, one group would receive a D, one a C, one a B, and one an A. However none of those groups deserved a D or even a C, all four presentations were at least B quality work. What this displayed was how this grading system inevitably is not giving us students the grades that we deserve for the work that we are putting into the class.

Overall, I feel that we should do away with the bell curve system, and be graded on a regular scale, with students getting the grades that they deserve for the work. If a student, or even a group does D or even failing work they probably deserve that grade. However no student or group should get a D for work that is B or A quality work just because that was how the grading scale was set up for the class.

Reflections on Group Presentations

During my tenure here at HWS, the majority of my classes have started out pretty slow, with the first major project not coming until a few weeks into the school year. I must say however that I enjoyed having this project right of the bat and having to immerse myself in the class immediately. With the grade scale being how it is, this project gave us students the chance to judge the quality of work our peers are willing to put into the class. The project also help us delve right into the subject at hand, Digital Networks, by allowing to judge when the Internet started and create a timeline from there. Enough for generalizations for now, as I would like to take a closer look at the individual presentations.

Group # 1 was my group and we looked at the modern day Internet as we know it, with a particular in depth focus on social networking sites. We saw social networking as a fixture in the future of the Internet and were interested to look at its evolution and how this evolution has affected the development of the Internet over the last 20 years. Looking back on our project now, I do feel like we did a good job with presenting good information, but feel our PowerPoint may have been able to be somewhat clearer. Obviously the lighting in the room did hinder that somewhat, and that is certainly something I will keep in mind when creating PowerPoint presentations in the future.

Group # 2 created a really interesting YouTube video that cited the 19th century as when the Internet began  develop with the advancement of communication means. While the style of the presentation was extremely unique, I felt some of the video clips were unclear and had little relation to the actual content of what the narrator was discussing. Rather than focusing on the development of the Internet, the group often sidetracked and focused on the development of the computer. Overall, it was still a great presentation that I did enjoy.

Group # 3 took another different approach and focused on the Internet as a means of transferring information between individuals. They program they used to display their timeline was really cool and was for sure a indicator of how far the Internet has really come. When it came down to the information that they presented I felt they really weren't discussing the history of the Internet. Rather the presentation became an in-depth look at the history of file-sharing. None the less, it was still a great presentation.

Group # 4 took the most in-depth look at the history of the Internet, presenting a simply laid out timeline on PowerPoint. They took an extremely broad approach and traced the founding of the Internet back the 1822 with the founding of the computer. They then looked at the progression of the computer and then the progression of the Internet up until today. The only criticisms I did have were the PowerPoint was unclear (much like my own groups) and they didn't cover very much recent history of the Internet. It still was a great presentation that I was able to learn from.

As a whole, I felt the class did a great job with their presentations. While we all took an extremely different approach to the presentations, I feel we all did complete the assignment that we were given. That is why I feel that the grading system that we have been given may not be completely fair. I will leave that discussions for another posting though....